In her celebrated essay “Against Decoration,” published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a “new formalism” that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are “humanist poems,” written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood.
Of The Devil’s Tour, she writes: “This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: ’The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav’n or a heav’n of hell … I myself am hell.” "Like Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney she intends poetry of the plain style and the truth of the unmistakably situated self, but is taught also, by desire (as they are not), to expect that among the deliquescent ruiins of the final body there will be found, as she says, 'illumined, my soul at last uncaged from ribs, rising.'" (Allen Grossman) |
An Excerpt
Croup
When he stands to cough the syrup from his lungs,
I arrive to sponge him cool, and he cries no
and no and no, the only syllable
to keep him whole. Today while staring through the O
in his last Cheerio, he mastered all and gone.
Then later came to fear his polar bear
would soon unravel in the wash, crib dismantle
where he stands, footsteps vanish where he walks,
for where he walks, I walk, and everywhere
my shadow falls. In bed, he cannot find
the shadow's edge, so stands and screams
in the crib's landing strip of starlight
like a small beast shaken from the moon.
I lift him, tote him to a stony room,
twist some knobs, rock him in warm steam.
Only in sickness will he rest
his cheek against my breast.
How heavy he feels in the vapors
refusing to merge into one creature.
Croup
When he stands to cough the syrup from his lungs,
I arrive to sponge him cool, and he cries no
and no and no, the only syllable
to keep him whole. Today while staring through the O
in his last Cheerio, he mastered all and gone.
Then later came to fear his polar bear
would soon unravel in the wash, crib dismantle
where he stands, footsteps vanish where he walks,
for where he walks, I walk, and everywhere
my shadow falls. In bed, he cannot find
the shadow's edge, so stands and screams
in the crib's landing strip of starlight
like a small beast shaken from the moon.
I lift him, tote him to a stony room,
twist some knobs, rock him in warm steam.
Only in sickness will he rest
his cheek against my breast.
How heavy he feels in the vapors
refusing to merge into one creature.